Geared tripod head comparison – Manfrotto Xpro vs Benro GD3WH.

[Music] [Music] thank you in today's video I'm going to look at two different geared tripod heads and I'm going to compare the two and look at the pros and cons of both types now the one I've got here is the manfrotto expro I've got a manfredo tripod so naturally I I went to try out the uh expro manfredo geared head and there are a lot of things I really like about it but there's one thing I don't like about it let's start first with the things that I do like about it what I do like about it are these big quick release levers they're nice and big it's really uh ergonomically designed so I can just simply pull this in like this and swivel around very quickly to the position that I want and that's really handy just literally pull down the knob here and you've got quick fast larger movements to swing the tripod around to roughly to the position that you want it to be in and then of course once you're in your rough position then you just simply turn these knobs to move and this and it moves around quite fast too you know these knobs are nice and big so you can really get some pretty quick movements so yeah we can move quickly like this aquaforth now I can maneuver roughly into the position I want and then I got fairly fast but now I'm turning with the with the knobs themselves and the movement is pretty wide and pretty quick so I can find this composition nice and fast there we go the leading line there with the the path leading in nicely I can find fine tune and I really like too is how you can really you can make big movements if you turn the knobs fast or I can turn nice and slowly make some really fine movements look tiny tiny adjustments now that's a real advantage of course to the uh geared heads they give you that ability to make some fine adjustments that you wouldn't make ordinarily with any other tripod head and now you can find you in that composition and crack off my shell very quickly I can easily if I want to also swing very quickly around here and zoom in on those mountains now that's a one advantage to the geared head when you've got a very tricky composition like this see I've got trees to the left trees to the left and right and trees and cables at the bottom so I really need to fine-tune the composition to get all those cables and all those trees out now this is not exactly an ideal composition but for it just gives you a good example of how these geared heads give you precise movements these precise movements can really help you fine-tune that composition and that is just something you would never get with a ball head or any other type of head so this is one massive advantage to the geared heads and I took a picture of this earlier I'll show you some great cloud and light over there the light cloud and light has gone now but still now that's the great thing about this and this manfrotto one as I say I love uh it's really ergonomically designed that you can just pull these levers down very quickly and make these fast rapid movements when you need to and like this but now comes the con now with geared heads obviously it's you know it's all down to the mechanics and there's always going to be maybe some slight movement it's never going to be as tight as a standard tripod head the ones that you can tighten the standard tripod heads that you can tighten up they're nice and tight and rigid and fixed into position and they won't move but the geared heads are most likely because they're on Gears never going to be as tight but the thing with the the manfredo X pro I found was there's quite a bit of movement in it see and that's something that bothered me see that's quite a bit of movement and what I found actually if we take this as an example so what I found was let's say for example fine tune my composition like so I've got everything perfectly set but then when I try to put a filter on you can see that it's moved slightly in some cases it moves quite a bit if the filter was very tight and really had to force that filter in I found that it actually moved quite a bit see there's quite a bit of movement there and I'm not making any adjustments here I'm simply moving my camera so this is a big downside to this uh X pro manfrotto geared head so we'll see how the next One Compares the next one I'm going to look at is the benro so now let's look at the uh benrow GD 3wh Gear Head now this one was recommended to me by my good friend Melvin Nicholson and if you're not familiar with him then I'll put a link up to his YouTube channel here go check him out the guy knows pretty much everything when it comes to photography equipment because he buys it all but he recommended me this and told me that this was much better than the manfredo tripod heads although he hadn't tried the x-pro one he had tried a cheaper version of the one that I just showed you but still I got hold of this to try this out and compare it to the manfrotto X pro gear Head which I've just shown you so the first thing I would say is extremely lightweight but just like the manfrotto X pro that was also extremely lightweight I'll put the the two the weight of the two up here right now so you can compare them side by side but the difference is not noticeable really you know maybe this is 100 grams heavier but you wouldn't notice there's no discernible difference really it's still super super lightweight now I got a man for a tripod so this is the benro head but it fits on perfectly so it's the same thread type and it fits on to the manfredo tripod perfectly so no problems there whatsoever just like before let's look at the pros first and then the cons now the biggest difference between the manfrotto X pro a manfrotto tripod heads and this benrow geared head is the plate this one as uh the manfrotto uses its own custom uh plate whereas uh the benro uses this ARCA Swiss type plate so it's slightly different in a minute I'll show you how the manfredo ones fit on but the Arca Swiss many of you are probably familiar as most tripod heads I think have this type of system so it's quite good it just slides on like this now it has a safety catch too so the first thing I thought was if you happen to have the tripod set up like this and you're trying to do an upright shot what if you accidentally knock this button turn it well there's a safety catch on there so that's good and you can turn it like this and it won't come out in order for it to come out on this like this you need to pull and turn again pull and turn again then it will come out completely but even if you pull and turn again it still is quite hard for it to fall out so then you turn it lock it turn it and you can't get it out unless you pull and turn again so again this has got a safety catch on too so that's useful so you see here this is the manfrotto plate and this is a man photo tripod head now all manfredo tripod heads are the same now you can see on the back here it's got an arrow pointing towards the lens and that means that you can only actually put it in one way so you can slot it in that way you can't slot it in that way it won't work so it only goes in one way and then you simply pull the lever out pull that and tighten it and it's fixed so if you put your camera into the upright position like that it's nicely fixed in there it's fixed into a recess so it's not going to slide out at all unless you pull this but the thing is it does have a bit of a safety mechanism too because you can't see if you pull that like that again it won't come all the way out unless you push this down then it will come all the way out so that also has a good safety lock on it same thing see so let's do that again if we pull that accidentally it will only pull so far and the plate stays firmly locked in there so your camera is nice and safe it won't fall off you then would have to pull that out and pull that down for it to fall out so just like the manfrotto this one simply screws on like this and you can have it like this or like this quite simply just line it up in the middle like that now you can use the Allen key provided or a big screwdriver or just simply pull up this and turn it so it's nice and tight however you want to do it and it's fit fixed on and you just simply put it on tighten it and that's nice and tight now one advantage to the Arca Swiss plate over the manfredo custom plate is this the ability to shoot this way if you haven't seen this way but if you're having to have a scene behind you too rather than try to rotate the whole camera around you can very easily just do this and then quickly reset the composition like so if you've got a scene that you can shoot either way you can flip your camera around very quickly rather than have to rotate it so that's a big plus for the Arca Swiss plate I think really like this I really like this until now I've always only used manfredo tripod heads so that is definitely a big Plus in my book now down to their geared head itself so first of all just like the manfrotto the knobs work nice and smooth smoothly and you can very even just turning the knobs actually you can very very quickly move your position up down side by side up down and up side by side like this or rotate and everything moves nice and fast when you need to make fairly big movements you can do so quite easily that's a big plus but again just like all geared heads and like the manfredo X pro you can also make these my Newt adjustments very very fine adjustments so you can really really refine your composition that is a huge plus when it comes to using a geared head for sure so as you saw with the manfrotto X pro when everything was fixed into place there was still some movement especially up and down when I put the filters on it would actually move my composition now it wasn't that it was loose because when everything was fixed into place and I even did several long exposures and they were perfectly sharp there was no camera Shake no movement during the exposure at all it's not that it was loose but you could actually move it now there was some Flex if you will it was kind of a elasticated movement and you could with if you move the camera itself the whole thing would move and it's not a problem if you're taking pictures of course but the problem I had as you saw was when I went to put the ND filter on it actually moved my composition now if you put in most filters on you could always readjust your composition no problem but when I put the 10 stop on and it was already quite low light as soon as I put the 10 stop on I couldn't see anything through the viewfinder or on my live view so it wasn't until after the exposure that I realized that my Camp composition would be messed up and I had no way of readjusting my composition because I couldn't see with the filter on so for me that was a big problem with the x-pro manfrotto but I'm happy to report that with the benro this is not an issue there is hardly any movement at all when everything is in place it's really nice and tight it's rigid there you know you can move it a tiny bit but not much if you move it like this it will just spring back to its original position so let's try it with the filter and see if it makes a difference as well so I've set up a composition I'll take one shot like that and now I'll put the this is the case 10 stop filter and it's quite thick and it's quite tight so when you push it in it fits nice and tight now the reason it does that because it fits against the gasket to make sure there's no light leakage so it's quite tight so it pushes down quite fast especially when you've got a long lens on it now I do an exposure with this one and we'll see if it's moved much now let's compare the two not much movement at all hardly anything so definitely an improvement over the x-pro in that respect nice and rigid nice and tight no flex at all in it now for the cons now as I said the knobs work nice and smoothly just like the x-pro everything turns you've got fairly good big movements you can make with the knobs themselves or nice and smooth tiny tiny adjustments now to make the big movements you have to turn this like this and here like this now again it works really well but these are actually quite hard on your fingers so I can see myself if you're doing this a lot you can see yourself getting sore fingers and especially in the winter probably when it's cold too it's quite hard on the fingers whereas the manfrotto it was really nice you just grab that little plate there and the knob you squeezed it together and you turned it nice and smooth now that was much better ergonomically the manfrotto was much much better and definitely I would say that this these kind these uh grabbing this and turning this yeah it's quite hard on your fingers and your thumb you know so if you're doing this a lot it's going to hurt after a while now the good thing though like I said is is the movements are quite good so you can you know in most cases you're not going to make super swinging movements you're not going to make lots of them that's for sure you may do it oh you need to swing around that way for example uh or I need to swing around that way you're not going to do it that often so if you're going to make fairly big adjustments like that you can still use the knob and avoid using these so I would definitely do that and avoid using these as as much as possible that's for sure so which one is best well they're both great quite frankly and they both do the job when it comes down to the actual Gear Head itself it works smoothly the knobs work smoothly on both the benro and the manfrotto X pro everything that a geared-headed both do everything that a geared head is supposed to do so in that respect they are both great now the only downside to the x-pro is the flex and of course with the benro you don't have the flex but the great thing about the x-pro was the ergonomics ergonomically it was great and you could grab that spin it around the knob so we're nice and small they're nice and smooth ergonomically it was fantastic whereas this again ergonomically when the knobs and everything works perfectly but this turning this bit here to to make the large movements is quite hard on your fingers so that is definitely a minus for the ben roof so when choosing between these two you have to decide what's important now for me what's important is the rigidity for most people as I say uh the only it's only an actually a problem when using this uh 10 stop ND filter because once I've got it on I can't see if my composition's been moved so that's a problem if you have the manfrotto Expo if you're not using a 10 stop filter or you're using a screen filter or a magnetic clip-on filter or something like that that's not going to move then it's not really a problem and if that was the case I'd probably have stuck stuck with the x-pro but because I have this and because for me that would be a big problem I'm going to stick with the benro so I hope you found this useful and if you did please give this video a like now hop down into the description if you're interested in either in the benro or the manfrotto X pro geared head then pop down in the description there's links in the description to several places where you can buy these tripod heads and I hope you found this comparison useful and uh if you're new to the Channel Please Subscribe and check out some of my other videos okay thanks for watching bye [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you

Channel: Ian Middleton : Photography & Travel

Views: 22,037

Keywords: Geared tripod heads; tripods, geared tripod head review, manfrotto xpro, benro GD3WH, benro, manfrotto, photography accessories, gear review, photography gear review, digital photography, best tripod head, best geared tripod head, manfrotto tripods, camera gear, photography gear, arca swiss plate, manfrotto quick release plate

Id: 0IT8svBF_Qo

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 12 2022